Semantic knowledge as a determinant of developmental differences in recall

Two experiments examined the possible role of children's semantic knowledge and their ability to encode it in a cued-recall test. Performance of children aged 7, 10, and 13 was observed in encoding specificity tasks, which used homographs as the to-be-remembered words (TBRs).In Experiment I, children of all ages performed better when the output cue words prompted similar meanings to the input cues, than when output and input meanings were incompatible. In Experiment II, all children were required to recall identical items, but younger children, owing to lack of knowledge, were unable to encode pairs comprising input and TBR words incompatibly with output cues. In such circumstances, younger subjects outperformed older subjects. When input and output cues were incompatible for all ages, recall increased with age, possibly due to older childrens' using more effective retrieval strategies.The findings indicate that semantic encoding influenced recall performance at each age. This suggests that age differences in memory are due to differences in the amount of semantic knowledge a child possesses for encoding and cuing and not to capacity differences.     

The perceived credibility of older adults as witnesses and its relation to ageism

In experiment 1, 267 undergraduates read a case summary and witness statement. Sex and age of the witness (49, 69, 79 or 89 years) were varied. Participants rated the witness's perceived convincingness, confidence, quality of observation, accuracy, honesty, competence, memory, suggestibility, and cognitive functioning. As well as an age effect for honesty, age by sex interactions were observed for several characteristics, particularly for comparisons of the 79-year-olds versus the 49-year-olds, and 89-year-olds versus the 49-year-olds. In experiment 2, 94 undergraduates read the same testimony given by a 79-year-old male or female witness, and completed the Fraboni Scale of Ageism and the Aging Semantic Differential. Participants who evidenced stronger aging stereotypes on these measures rated the witness less favorably than did participants who were less prejudiced. This experiment is the first to show a link between perceived credibility of older adults and ageist attitudes. Practical applications regarding how older witnesses are viewed by jurors, and the criminal justice system more generally, are discussed.     

A new look at time and eternity

In his Systematic Theology, Vol. III, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that God as eternal comprehends the different moments of time simultaneously and orders them to constitute a whole or totality. The author contends that this approach to time and eternity might solve the logical tension between the classical notion of divine sovereignty and the common sense belief in creaturely spontaneity/human freedom. For, if the existence of the events constituting a temporal sequence is primarily due to the spontaneous decisions of creatures, and if their being ordered into a totality or meaningful whole is primarily due to the superordinate activity of God, then both God and creatures play indispensable but nevertheless distinct roles in the cosmic process.     

Sex Differences in Math-Intensive Fields

Despite impressive employment gains in many fields of science, women remain underrepresented in fields requiring intensive use of mathematics. Here we discuss three potential explanations for women's underrepresentation: (a) male-female mathematical and spatial ability gaps, (b) sex discrimination, and (c) sex differences in career preferences and lifestyle choices. Synthesizing findings from psychology, endocrinology, sociology, economics, and education leads to the conclusion that, among a combination of interrelated factors, preferences and choices-both freely made and constrained-are the most significant cause of women's underrepresentation.     

Church and Culture: Protestant and CatholicModernities

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.     

Fortysomething: Recognizing faces at one’s 25th reunion

Twenty-four to 26 years after their high school graduation, subjects matched 40 photographs of former classmates taken from the high school yearbook with 40 current photographs of these same former classmates. Compared with age-matched control subjects who had no prior familiarity with the persons depicted in the photographs, the former classmates were superior at matching the old and new photographs. Generally, same-orientation photographs (i.e., old and new photographs taken from the same side) were matched more accurately than different-orientation photographs. Prior familiarity, however, rendered the orientation factor unimportant. These findings are discussed in terms of the processes that underlie facial recognition over very long intervals and in terms of their psycholegal implications.     

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005)

Presents an obituary for Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005). Before Urie Bronfenbrenner, child psychologists studied the child, sociologists the family, anthropologists the society, economists the economic framework, and political scientists the structure. As the result of Urie's extension of the concept of the ecology of human development, these environments--from the family to economic and political structures--are viewed as part of the life course, embracing both childhood and adulthood. Bronfenbrenner, widely regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in developmental psychology, child rearing, and human ecology--the interdisciplinary domain he helped popularize--died at his home in Ithaca, New York, on September 25, 2005, at the age of 88. He was the Jacob Gould Sherman Professor Emeritus of Human Development and of Psychology at Cornell University, where he spent most of his professional career. A brief biography of Bronfenbrenner is followed by an overview of his published work, his theories and other influential accomplishments.     

Contextual Trends in Intellectual Development

I argue that the historical rupture between paradigms and theories rooted in the acontextual processing accounts of classical physics (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/ 1913) and those rooted in contextualist accounts like Bartlett′s (1932) is being bridged by an emerging trend to incorporate elements from both traditions into a unified account of cognitive development. Two such accounts are the Bio-ecological Theory of intellectual development and the Triarchic Theory of intelligence. I draw on these two theories for illustrative examples of what I perceive to be a more general trend among cognitive developmentalists. Both theories are multipronged frameworks for conceptualizing individual differences in intellectual development. In this paper, however, I focus on only one of these prongs, namely, the contextually dependent nature of processing resources. Regardless of the ultimate success of these two theories, I believe that their successors will continue the trend of incorporating context into processing accounts of cognitive growth, thus bridging the paradigms of Ebbinghaus and Bartlett.